by Will Self
A thread of white luminescence circled the screen. When it sped past a certain region there were splutters of light.
‘Are those the birds?’ he asked, pointing towards the fading gleams.
‘Ya, that’s right. Charlie-Bob has rigged them all up with little radar cones. Mind you’ – he barked a laugh, which the throat mike transmitted as a howl – ‘I don’t think you could put ’em on grouse. Poor buggers would be dwarfed by the things!’
There was a scatter of microphonic squawks from the other guns – they were obviously getting restive. ‘Well, if you’ll excuse me, old boy,’ said Peter-Donald, cocking his gun, ‘I’ll get this drive started and then we’ll be off your property, eh?’
Despite the warning painful catch in his throat Simon-Arthur stood his ground, interested to see what would happen. The guns formed up again into a ragged line. Even in the short time he and Peter-Donald had been chatting, the fog had grown denser. Now, not only were the beaters no longer within sight, but the trees themselves were little more than shadows.
Peter-Donald took a wafer-thin cellular phone from the pocket of his jacket and punched one of the buttons on its console. ‘I think we’re ready now, Charliekins,’ he barked, the mouthpiece pressed against his throat mike. ‘D’you want to start the drive?’
There was a ragged chorus of shouts and ‘Halloos!’, together with the sound of stout sticks being smote against the underbrush. Then there was a warbling, almost grunting noise, and ten or fifteen pheasants came staggering out of the bank of fog. They had radar cones tied around their necks. These were silvery-grey rhomboids, at least four times bigger than the birds’ heads. The effect was ridiculous and pathetically unnatural: the birds – who Simon-Arthur knew found it hard to fly anyway when the fog was thick – were still further handicapped by this new sporting technology. Only two or three of them could get airborne at all, and then only for a couple of wing beats. The rest just zigzagged in a loose pack across the traverse of the guns, the sharp corners of the radar cones banging first into their eyes and then their soft throats.
There were a few scattered shots – none of which appeared to find a mark. Most of the guns held their fire.
‘Not much sport in this, is there?’ said Simon-Arthur sarcastically, and then realised with a shock that he had spoken audibly. He had been out in the fog for so long that he had begun to assume that he must be wearing a muffling mask.
But this didn’t seem to offend Peter-Donald. He was striding towards the fence, and signalling to the other guns to follow. He turned on his heel for a moment, facing back towards Simon-Arthur, and publicly-addressed him. ‘It is, if we let them get into the fog bank. D’ye see? Then we’ve got a shoot entirely on instrumentation’ – he indicated the wristscreen – ‘now that’s real sport!’ Then he swivelled round and marched off.
The birds had managed to reach the fence and stagger over or under it. Then they were enveloped by the fog. The guns followed them, and finally trailing behind came the donkey-jacketed figures of the beaters, who also disappeared, still hallooing. Simon-Arthur noticed that most of them weren’t even wearing chemical masks.
Simon-Arthur stood for a moment, and then turned towards the house. But when he reached the front door, and was just about to turn the knob, he saw that one of the pheasants hadn’t managed to make it over the fence. It was running about distractedly, crazily even, in the area between the house and the fence. As Simon-Arthur watched it, it charged towards him and then veered away again locking into a spiralling path, like an aeroplane in a flat spin, or a clockwork toy run amok.
The pheasant was producing the most alarming noises, splutterings and gurgles. Simon-Arthur walked towards where its next circumnavigation of the muddy patch of ground ought to take it, arriving just in time for the bird to cough up at his feet an enormous dollop of blood and mucus, and then expire, its radar cone jammed into the ground. ‘My God!’ exclaimed Simon-Arthur. He leant down to examine the corpse. The pheasant’s feathers were matted, greasy and lustreless. It was a male bird, but its plumage was almost entirely dun-coloured. Simon-Arthur felt nauseous upon noticing that there were flecks and dollops of some white matter in the spreading stain of fluid that was still pouring from its beak.
One of the guns must have been lingering behind the group and heard Simon-Arthur’s exclamation, because a masked figure carrying a shotgun came striding out of the fog bank, clambered none too nimbly over the fence and walked over to where he was crouched by the dead pheasant. As the figure approached he pulled off his mask. It was, Simon-Arthur realised with an access of warm feeling, Anthony-Anthony Bohm, the local doctor.
‘Anthony-Anthony!’ Simon-Arthur said, standing up and thrusting out his hand. It was taken and warmly shaken by the doctor, whose rubicund face was registering some concern.
‘You really should get inside, Simon-Arthur,’ he said. ‘This is no kind of a day to be out without a mask, and preferably a scuba.’
‘I know, I know, I was just going in when this poor creature expired at my feet. What d’you think of that?’
The doctor crouched down, puffing, and peered at the dead bird. One of his hands went to the ruff of white beard that fringed his pink buttock of a chin, while the other probed the pheasant’s neck. It was a gesture so familiar to Simon-Arthur from Anthony-Anthony’s consulting room that he smiled to see it in this unusual circumstance. ‘Hmm, hmm, hmm-hmm,’ the Doctor hmm-ed and then, picking up the bird, opened its beak and looked down it.
‘Look at that white matter in the blood – what on earth can it be?’
‘Oh that – that’s a carcinoma. Nothing particularly mysterious.’
‘A carcinoma?’
‘Ye-es.’
‘So what did it die of?’
‘Oh cancer, of course. Yes, definitely cancer – of the throat, and no doubt of the lung as well. The effort of being driven by the beaters like that must have given it a massive haemorrhage.’
‘I had no idea the animals were getting cancer in this fashion, Anthony-Anthony.’
‘My dear Simon-Arthur, we get cancer, why shouldn’t all of God’s other creatures, hmm?’ The doctor was struggling to his feet again; Simon-Arthur gave him an arm.
‘Ooof! Well, that’s me for this morning, I think I’ll head back to the health centre, I’ve a surgery this afternoon. Do you mind if I take the pheasant with me, Simon-Arthur?’
‘Not at all. Are you going to run some tests on it, Anthony-Anthony, do an autopsy, or whatever it is you call it?’
‘Good heavens, no! Oh no, ahaha-no-no-aha-ha-h’ach-eurch-cha-cha –’ The doctor’s jolly laughter turned with grim predictability into a coughing fit. Simon-Arthur thumped the tubby man on his broad back, whilst Anthony-Anthony struggled to don his scuba mask again. When he had it on and was breathing easily, he took the dead bird from Simon-Arthur who had picked it up by its sad scruff.
‘Thanks very much, old fellow. No, no, I know what killed the thing so it’s of no interest to medical science. I used to be a dab hand with the scalpel, so I’ll cut the tumours out and the lady wife and I can have this one for Sunday lunch. Now, do get inside, Simon-Arthur, I don’t want to see you at surgery this afternoon.’ They bade farewell, and the doctor vanished into the sickly yellow of the boiling fog bank.
The Doctor didn’t see Simon-Arthur at his emergency surgery that afternoon, because against Jean-Drusilla and Christabel-Sharon’s pleading, he decided to take a walk.
Simon-Arthur had been trying to work in his studio all morning, but the terrible vision from the previous night kept haunting him. He fancied he could still hear every faltering breath and choking cough of the Brown House’s inhabitants. And when in the mid-morning he took a break and went down to inhale some steam with Friar’s Balsam, the sight of the children sitting in a silent row on one of the sofas in the drawing room, while the maid passed the nebuliser mask from one to the next, brought tears to his eyes.
When they were all seated at the dining-roo
m table, eating off the second-best china because it was a Saturday, Simon-Arthur addressed the table at large, saying, ‘I think I’ll go out after lunch, just for a breath’ – he bit back the figure of speech – ‘for a walk.’
‘I really feel you oughtn’t, Simon-Arthur,’ said his wife. ‘You were out for far too long this morning, and without a mask. You know what Anthony-Anthony says, even with a chemical mask you shouldn’t really be out for more than half an hour at a time.’
‘It’s just that I feel terribly claustrophobic in the house today. I haven’t had a walk for almost a month now. I’ll go up to the golf course and then I’ll come straight back. I’ll be fine. I didn’t even have too much of a turn after going out this morning.’
‘Please don’t, Simon-Arthur,’ said Christabel-Sharon. Her freckle-spattered features were tight with concern. ‘You know the Patriarch is coming to say a special mass tomorrow. You won’t want to miss that. And if you go out for a walk you’ll have been out for forty minutes – and you shan’t be able to go and get the medicated incense for his censors in Risborough.’
‘Please, everyone, don’t worry!’ Simon-Arthur said this a little louder than he intended to. But he hated having it drawn to his attention just how dependent all of them were on him, right down to the very practice of their religion. ‘I’m going out for a walk and that-is-that.’
Simon-Arthur went up the farm track, through the farm and past the manor house where Peter-Donald and his family lived. The fog had lifted ever so slightly and he could see the crenellated chimneys of the house. He wondered whether Peter-Donald had managed to get a good bag, or at any rate a non-cancerous one.
It was uncomfortable walking. The mask he wore was a cheap model. Really only a plastic mouth- and nosepiece, containing a thick wad of cotton wool soaked with Ventalin. The straps chafed the back of his head, and the smell of the chemicals when he inhaled was almost worse than the fog itself.
Simon-Arthur reached the road on the far side of the estate and crossed it. The ground here was completely devoid of grass cover. The land had been bought up by a Japanese syndicate about a year before the fog descended. It was less expensive, then, for Japanese golfers to fly to England to play than to join a club in their own country. The syndicate had landscaped the course, but when the fog came they abandoned the whole project. Now the prospect of bare mud, formed into useless fairways, bunkers and greens that were really browns, looked wholly unearthly and anti-natural, like some section of an alien planet, poorly terraformed.
As he walked, Simon-Arthur dwelt once again – as he had so many times before – on the crippling irony of his bringing his family to live in the country. He had done it because Henry had bad asthma – as he did himself. Their doctor in London was certain that it was pollution-related. About four months after they had taken up residence in the Brown House the fog moved in with them.
‘Oh Christ! Oh God, oh Jesus. Please come! Please help us. We are but clay, but dust …’ Simon-Arthur muttered this through his mask; and then, not quite knowing why, but feeling that if he wanted to pray aloud it was unseemly to do it with this ugly mask on, he took it off.
To his surprise the fog didn’t taste that bad, or catch in his throat. He took a few shallow, experimental breaths to check that he wasn’t mistaken. He wasn’t: the fog no longer oozed soupily into his constricted chest. He took some deeper breaths, and with a further shock felt his eustachian tubes clear – audibly popping as they did so – for the first time in years. Now he could hear cars moving along the road behind him with great clarity. He took a few more, deeper breaths. It was amazing, the fog must be clearing, he thought; the miasma must be departing from our lives!
Then he started to take in great gouts of air, savouring the cleanness of its taste. ‘At last, at last!’ he shouted out, and heard his voice reverberate the way it should do, not fall flat. ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thankyou, thangyou, thangyu,’ he garbled. The fog was lifting, there was a bright light up ahead of him, beyond the fourth green of the half-constructed course. Simon-Arthur strode towards it, his legs feeling light and springy. He was an intensely religious man, and he crossed himself as he staggered forward; crossed himself and counted out a decade on the rosary in his pocket. He was prepared for Redemption.
They didn’t find the icon painter’s body until the following day. Jean-Drusilla had alerted the authorities after Simon-Arthur had been gone for forty minutes, but by then it was already getting dark and the fog was too thick for a search party, even with high-powered lights. As for radar, that too was useless, for there was a particularly high magnesium content building up in that evening’s opacity.
By chance Peter-Donald and Anthony-Anthony were in the party that found him. He was spread out, smeared even, on the muddy surface, in much the same posture that the cancerous pheasant had expired on the day before. Like the pheasant, a pool of blood and mucus had flowed out from his mouth and stained the ground. And, as before, the doctor knelt down and examined the white flecks in the stain.
‘Poor bugger,’ he said, ‘how strange, he had cancer as well. Never thought to give him an X-ray, because I felt certain that his asthma was going to get him first. He wasn’t well at all, you know.’
Peter-Donald was taking his ease on a shooting stick he’d pressed into the mud. ‘Well, at least the fellow had the decency not to die on the green, eh?’ It wasn’t that he was being disrespectful to Simon-Arthur’s memory, it was only that the times bred a certain coarseness of manner in some – just as they engendered extreme sensitivity in others.
‘Yes, well, he must have had the haemorrhage on the green, and then rolled into this bunker and died.’
‘Tidy, what?’
‘You could put it that way.’ The doctor stood up and indicated to the stretcher bearers who were with them that they should remove the body. ‘The peculiar thing is that he and I saw a pheasant die in just this fashion yesterday.’
‘What, of cancer?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Well, y’know, Anthony-Anthony, I can’t say I’m surprised in Simon-Arthur’s case. Not only was the fellow asthmatic, but I used to see him all over the shop without a scuba on. Bloody silly – foolhardy even.’
Without bothering further with the corpse, the two men turned and headed off back towards the manor. They were looking forward to a glass of linctus before lunch. Both of them had chronic bronchitis – and neither was as young as he used to be. For a while their conversation could be heard through the clouds of noxious dankness:
‘You know, Peter-Donald, I don’t believe the Dykeses can afford proper scubas. Hardly anyone in the area can, apart from yourself – I have one because of my job, you know.’
‘Really? Oh well, I suppose it stands to reason. Did you say that bird had cancer? D’you think I should get some special masks made for the pheasants? I shouldn’t want them all to get it –’
And then they too were swallowed up by the fog.
Grey Area
I was standing by the facsimile machine this afternoon, peering through the vertical, textured fabric louvres that cover every window in the Company’s offices and which are linked together with what look like lengths of cheap key-chain. I was waiting, because all too often the facsimile machine misfeeds and two sheets run through together. So, when I send a facsimile I always send the sheets through one by one. It’s time-consuming, but it leads to fewer mistakes. I have become so adept at this task that I can now perform it by sound rather than sight. When the sheets are feeding through correctly, the machine makes a whirring, chirruping noise, like a large insect feeding. When I push in the leading edge of a new sheet, there is a momentary hesitation, a predatory burr, then I feel the mandibles of nylon-brush clutch and nibble at it. When the entire document has been passed through the body of the facsimile machine, it clicks, then gives off a high-pitched peep.
This afternoon, just as the machine peeped, I sensed a presence behind me. I turned
. I had noticed him a couple of times before. I don’t know his name, but I have an idea he works in personnel. I noticed him because there is something wrong with his clothing – or the way he wears it, the way it hangs on his body. His suits cling to him, his flies look like an appendicectomy scar, puckered and irregular. We grunted acknowledgements to each other. I tamped the sheets of paper into a neat stack. I moved past him, across the floor, and through the swing doors into the corridor that leads back to the Department.
The Department must always be capitalised when it is referred to by its members, in order to differentiate it from other departments. Of course, other departments must also be capitalised by their members. This makes the paperwork for inter-departmental meetings – for which I often have responsibility – complex to arrange. A different word-processed document is needed for each departmental representative.
The formats and protocols for all the Company’s communications were modified by the Head of Department, who’s my boss, when he took over about six months ago.
The document that set out these modifications was ring-bound and about seventy pages long. Nevertheless, he asked me to pull apart the plastic knuckles that gripped one of the copies, and attach the sheets in a long row to the bulletin board that runs the entire length of the Department’s main corridor. He said that this was so everyone in the Department would be certain to pay attention to them.
It must be as a result of initiatives such as these that my boss has enjoyed such a phenomenally quick rise through the hierarchy of the Company.
I had to walk right along this corridor to get back to my office, which is situated, opposite my boss’s, up a dog-leg of stairs at the far end. I can’t understand why we don’t have a facsimile machine in the Department. Every other department has at least one, and more often than not several. We have a networked computer system, modem links, numerous photocopiers, document-sorters and high-speed laserprinters, but no facsimile machine. I have never asked my boss why this is the case, because it was like this before he became Head of Department, and perhaps he, like me, has come to accept it as an aspect of the status quo.
